The Sacrament of Obedience: Liturgical Colonialism and Anglican Hierarchy in the Silencing of Black Ecclesial Liberation

Abstract This article argues that, in colonial and segregationist contexts, Anglican liturgical structures functioned not merely as modes of worship but as ritual technologies of governance that displaced Black sacred knowledge and disciplined Black ecclesial agency. Through the analytic framework of Dislocated Knowing™ – the recursive, institutionally produced condition in which Afro-diasporic individuals are compelled to translate, suppress or reframe their knowledge in order to function within Euro-American epistemologies – the study demonstrates how Anglican hierarchy and ritual form produced a liturgical environment in which obedience was sacralized and liberation rendered unintelligible. The article names this formation the Sacrament of Obedience: a colonial sacrament that moralizes submission, constrains embodied expression, redefines communal authority and produces theological misrecognition by casting hierarchy as divine order. Genealogical analysis traces how these dynamics emerged through missionary practice, plantation worship and segregated episcopacy, establishing a durable pattern of epistemic and ritual displacement within Black ecclesial life. Moving from critique to construction, the article advances a decolonial liturgical imagination that reverses Dislocated Knowing™ by restoring communal authority, reclaiming African sacred memory, reintroducing prophetic disruption, redistributing sacramental agency and reorienting worship toward the liberating character of God. It establishes that Black ecclesial liberation requires not merely the critique of colonial liturgical residues, but their dismantling, so that worship may once again testify to the God who frees.